Sunday is an ideal day for overeating, and where better but a five-star brunch. This Sunday, feeling decidedly chinese, I headed to the Pan Asian at the ITC Grand Maratha for their Sunday Brunch.

It turns out that the Chinese are in the middle of their Moon Festival, the chowmein version of our very own Kojagiri (or Lakshmi) Poornima. Related to the equinox, this day considered to be the brightest full moon in the year (and a good day to see the glitter of money). Luckily, food is involved – specially those strange creations called moon cakes.

The ITC is my favourite far eastern Sunday Brunch. The only other choice nearby – Spices at the JW Marriot – does have a good spread too (more sushi choices) but they tend to have the same things on their menu every Sunday (right down to the desserts). Overall, I like the ITC better -great dim sum, polished Peking duck, unlimited salmon and tuna sashimi, a grill counter, a decent choice of salads, main courses and desserts. This time they had a fantastic lamb shank on the buffet – fat marrow-filled bones wrapped with meat in a Chinese 5-spice sauce.

Then, of course, there’s the mooncake. It was indeed on the dessert menu, but people avoid it in the most part. The mooncake at the ITC was one single kind - Cantonese style. I find mooncakes a little wierd too – very dense, strange texture and a thin, sweet skin. Pleasant, but hardly the stuff of my dreams. The Chinese never did very well with desserts; their obsession with the mooncake is similarly a little hard to get excited by.